Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Reassessing Some Assertions

Though the oldest child listed in the census records for the
Patrick Kelly family of Fort Wayne was Frederick, we’ve already
seen that he was actually Patrick’s stepson. After the arrival of the first
child born to Patrick and Emma—Kathryn, whom we met Sunday—the family was
blessed with the child who was actually Patrick’s first son.

According to records from Saint Patrick’s Church, this son
was baptized as John Clifford Kelley on May 6, 1902, shortly after his birth on
April 26. Despite my assertion of a couple days ago regarding most godparents
of that time period being family members, Clifford—as the family called him—had
sponsors at his baptism whose names don’t fit into any family history reports I’ve
been able to find: Clifford J. Moran and Mary Agnes Dalton. Perhaps there was a
significance in the baby’s middle name being the same as his godfather’s first name—a
story I’ll have to pursue at another time.

It hasn’t been easy, finding any records of this child’s
early years. While other Kelly relatives had their names inserted in society
page reports about birthday parties or first communions, Patrick’s son John
Clifford either had an evil twin in town, or was up to no good at a very early age, based upon reports I
could glean from the various Fort
Wayne newspapers.

Of course, the frequent switch between spellings of Kelly
versus Kelley, combined with the preferred usage of his middle name instead of
his first name, John, added a challenge to that search.

What I did find, in The
Fort Wayne News and Sentinel on May 24, 1918, probably was our Clifford
Kelly, though. The page three insert in the Industrial News section simply
mentioned,

Clifford Kelley has
accepted a position in the small motor detail department of the Fort Wayne Electric works
as bench and machine operator and has started on his new duties.

Some time before the end of 1920, though, the young Clifford
found a more promising position with a company called either Dudlo or Dudio—the
optical character recognition programs scanning old documents such as the books
and newspapers of that time period driving me to distraction (not to mention, my own eyes, too). Even now,
performing a Google™ search on the term yields results for each of the
variations—both asserting it is DudloandDudio.

Whatever the name, the enterprise was cutting edge for its
time, and Patrick Kelly’s son Clifford became a small part of it.

That position didn’t last long, however, as I learned from
an obituary appearing in The Fort Wayne
News Sentinel on February 28, 1921. Whatever cut a successful young man down
two months before his twentieth birthday made me realize I’ll have to revise
another assertion I’ve made about this generation of the Kelly family: that
life in this new century was going so much better than it had been in his
parents’ era.

What could cause a young man to lose his life so soon? I
wished that the death information provided in such services as FamilySearch.org
still included scanned copies of death certificates, so I could observe the
cause of death—as well as ascertain that illegible handwriting hadn’t been
incorrectly transcribed. Now, all I could do was try to read between the lines
in a brief obituary.

One clue I found was that Clifford had been hospitalized for
six weeks before his passing. Thinking of the time period, I wondered, could it
be due to the flu epidemic? Not being one for sterling memory when it came to
high school history class (never could retain those dates), I had to look up
when the devastating pandemic had occurred.

While the date range of the epidemic did indeed take in the
year of 1920 at the tail end of its destruction, owing to another clue in the
obituary, I realized Clifford lost his life due to a different cause.

The obituary mentioned that Clifford actually died at a
hospital. Fortunately—though I found this somewhat unusual—the specific
hospital was mentioned. Since the name of the hospital was not one I recalled
from other family news, I once again tried my hand at
genealogy-research-by-Google™.

The name of the facility was given as “the Irene Byron
hospital.” Given that the family lived near downtown Fort
Wayne—not to mention, that the family was Catholic—the presumed
hospital of choice would have been Saint Joseph’s hospital, but evidently that was not the case
for Clifford.

I found my first clue about this other hospital from a website page of Allen County's Health Department, which called it the Byron
Tuberculosis Sanatorium. The facility was named in honor of Patricia Irene Byron, appointed Superintendent of the Allen County
Tuberculosis Hospital,
who subsequently served as a volunteer army nurse during World War I. She
herself, apparently, contracted tuberculosis and died at Camp
McArthur in Texas in 1918.

Following four months of illness, including the six-week
hospitalization at the Sanatorium, Clifford became the first to leave the Kelly
family home, the young, athletic man succumbing to the disease on February 28, 1921.

J. Clifford Kelly, 18-year-old son
of Mr. and Mrs. Patrick Kelly, 831
Huestis avenue, died at 7 o'clock this morning at
the Irene Byron hospital where he had been a patient for six weeks. He had been
employed at the Dudio plant until his illness four months ago. He graduated
from the St. Patrick's parochial school, and was a popular member of the Holy
Name society and the Lyceum Athletic association.

Surviving are the mother, and the
father who is engineer at the No. 3 pumping station; four sisters, Catherine,
Helen, Marie and Mildred, and three brothers, Fred, Emmet, and Stephen, all
living at home.

Funeral services will be held at the
home Thursday morning at 8:30 o'clock and at the St. Patrick's church at 9
o'clock, with Rev. Joseph F. Delaney officiating. Burial in the Catholic
cemetery.

6 comments:

Colleen, this certainly was a story that helped me exercise the ability to read between the lines.

Sometimes, I can't help but wonder what would have happened if these young ancestors had not lost their life so early. A futile bit of daydreaming, I suppose, but one that surely comes of being part of a small family, myself...

In the non-OCR sources, the company name is spelled Dudlo (DUDLO) - and they made "magnetic ignition coils." Given Clifford worked with small electrical motors, this "career change" makes sense - ignition coils are essentially small electrical motors that used to cause spark plugs to spark (they are rarely used now with the advent of "electronic" engine controls which use power transistors).

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